After hours and hours of searching and reading tons of reader comments I settled on the The Pelican Hotel for our 4 nights in Miami.  It was posted as $160 a night, but with the fourth-night-free special they were running it came to $120 a night.  Seemed like a great price for right on Ocean Drive across the street from the beach.

When we arrived the room was not ready yet, but we arrived before the official check-in time so we expected this to happen.  The lady at the front desk was very friendly and offered to take our bags and give us a call as soon at the room was ready.  We decided to get some lunch and right at 3:00, as promised,  the hotel called to let us know our room was ready.

We were given the “Peace, Love, and Leaf Forest” room on the second floor.  The room was nicely decorated and furnished.  Being a boutique-style hotel the room was pretty small, but we planned on spending most of our time on the beach and not in the room anyway.

My base requirements for a hotel room are really quite simple.  It needs to be clean, the a/c needs to work well, the bed needs to be firm, and the shower needs to have good pressure.  Very few hotels score a 4 out of 4 on the Shane scale but the Pelican did!  The a/c was so good, in fact, that Heather had to add extra blankets the first night to stay warm.

On top of this, the Pelican also provided beach towels, beach chairs, and an umbrella each day.  I didn’t realize how great this was until I learned that it would cost $60 to $75 a day to rent the chairs and umbrella.  So, the $120 a night seems like even more of steal now.

If I ever need a hotel in the South Beach area of Miami again I will definitely check the Pelican out first.  If you are headed to South Beach you can’t go wrong with a room here.

While I was in Miami Beach I took the time to stop in and pay a visit to the local Apple Store.  This brings my tally to 6 stores visited and should move me into 2nd place in the informal office competition.  I have updated my Apple Stores Visited page in case you want to learn more.

I used my new-every-two credit from Verizon to upgrade to the new Blackberry Tour last week.  So far I am liking it.  The newer OS seems faster and the brighter, higher definition screen is very nice.  However there are 2 nagging issues I am still working to figure out.

1. My old 8830 I could get to vibrate when in the holster and ring when not in the holster.  I also had it vibrate for a text message when in the holster and play a sound when not in the holster.  I have not figured out how to do this correctly on the Tour yet.
2. With the new OS you sill cannot “reply to all” without opening the email first.  This was a big “miss” on the 8830 and is an even bigger “MISS” this time around.

So I did not try to log on to Facebook at 12:01 this morning to claim my username.  I figured I would get what I get and would be happy with it.  I was pleased to find that nearly 12 hours later that “shane.kenny” was still available.  If you want to find me on Facebook, you can now go to www.facebook.com/shane.kenny.  Maybe some old friends in real life will become new friends on Facebook and I will finally have more Facebook friends than Heather.

I just finished reading Tribes by Seth Godin.  It takes me a while to finish a book sometimes because I get distracted by other things.  In this case my Runner’s World came in and I got back into playing Fallout 3 on my Xbox.  Seth’s writing style took me a little while to adapt to but overall I enjoyed the book and pulled several good things from it.  Here is quote the I specifically enjoying in the closing sections of the book (the book does not have chapters, which is non-traditional, which is part of the point the book makes):

If your organization requires success before commitment, it will not have either.

The same thing goes for products.  If a company waits for a product to be successful before committing to it then it will never be successful.  There are very few products that hit the market and are an instant success.  Instead, you have to get the product out there, improve on it, market it, and work hard to make it into a success.  To use other business terms you may have to “invest” in a product well before it takes off (maybe years).  This is harder for a company that already has one successful product because the new product is always “behind” and you have to work harder on it.  But, in the end, would the time, cost, and effort be worth having two successful products instead of just one?